us all be
young.--Ah! but priest and people are no longer one. A divorce without
end begins, a gulf unpassable divides them for ever. The priest
himself, a lord and prince, will come out in his golden cope, and
chant in the royal speech of that great empire which is no more. For
ourselves, a mournful company, bereft of human speech, of the only
speech that God would care to hear, what else can we do but low and
bleat with the guileless friends who never scorn us, who, in
winter-time will keep us warm in their stable, or cover us with their
fleeces? We will live with dumb beasts, and be dumb ourselves.

In sooth there is less need than before for our going to church. But
the church will not hold us free: she insists on our returning to hear
what we no longer understand. Thenceforth a mighty fog, a fog heavy
and dun as lead, enwraps the world. For how long? For a whole
millennium of horror. Throughout ten centuries, a languor unknown to
all former times seizes upon the Middle Ages, even in part on those
latter days that come midway betwixt sleep and waking, and holds them
under the sway of a visitation most irksome, most unbearable; that
convulsion, namely, of mental weariness, which men call a fit of
yawning.

When the tireless bell rings at the wonted hours, they yawn; while the
nasal chant is singing in the old Latin words, they yawn. It is all
foreseen, there is nothing to hope for in the world, everything will
come round just the same as before. The certainty of being bored
to-morrow sets one yawning from to-day; and the long vista of
wearisome days, of wearisome years to come, weighs men down, sickens
them from the first with living. From brain to stomach, from stomach
to mouth, the fatal fit spreads of its own accord, and keeps on
distending the jaws without end or remedy. An actual disease the pious
Bretons call it, ascribing it, however, to the malice of the Devil. He
keeps crouching in the woods, the peasants say: if anyone passes by
tending his cattle, he sings to him vespers and other rites, until he
is dead with yawning.[12]

[12] An illustrious Breton, the last man of the Middle Ages,
who had gone on a bootless errand to convert Rome, received
there some brilliant offers. "What do you want?" said the
Pope.--"Only one thing: to have done with the Breviary."

* * * * *

_To be old_ is to be weak. When the Saracens, when the Norsemen
threaten us, what will